Johny Hendricks and the question of a fighter's free will

The story goes that when Johny Hendricks wanted to find out if he had what it took to become an MMA fighter, he headed to Las Vegas.

He was fresh off a decorated college wrestling career at Oklahoma State, where he’d been a two-time national champion, and full of the swagger that goes with it as he sauntered into the Xtreme Couture gym.

Hendricks drew MMA vet Phil Baroni for his first sparring session. As Hendricks’ father, Keith, told me a couple years later, he knew things were headed in a dangerous direction right away.

“Johny was just hitting on ol’ Baroni, didn’t even know how to hit,” Keith Hendricks told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “I was watching and kind of chuckling to myself because he doesn’t know how to do this. He’s been a wrestler all his life. Well, I guess he hit Baroni pretty good, and Baroni came back and hit him with a 1-2-3, and it was over with. He knocked him clean out.”

Ask Hendricks today, and he’ll tell you this story as if he remembers it clearly, though he doesn’t. What he’s telling you is what he’s pieced together from other people’s descriptions of it. He doesn’t remember the knockout, just like he doesn’t remember walking up and introducing himself to Randy Couture later that day, or walking up and introducing himself to Randy Couture all over again a few minutes later. He doesn’t remember telling his father back at the hotel that this was all a bad idea, that he’d be better off going home to Oklahoma to become a wrestling coach, that he’d had enough of this MMA stuff for one lifetime. His father remembers it, though. He thought it all sounded quite reasonable, and so they agreed to leave in the morning.

You can imagine his father’s surprise when he went to pack up and check out of the hotel the next day and his son was eager to get back in the gym for more. He thought they’d already decided on the opposite, but the Johny he was talking to in the morning wasn’t the same one he’d made plans with the day before.

“I was like, why would I go home?” Johny Hendricks recalled. “I just kind of looked at my dad and said, ‘Let’s do this. Let’s give this a shot.'”

So he did, and you can see for yourself how well that’s worked out. Here he is, a day away from a welterweight showdown with Martin Kampmann at UFC 154 that could potentially put him in line for a title shot, and it all could have been wiped out with one different decision. Maybe there’s an alternate universe where Hendricks didn’t change his mind in the morning, where he really did go back to Oklahoma and become a wrestling coach. Maybe it’s not such a bad life. Then again, maybe it’s not a decision he was really capable of making, even if he thought he was at the time.

I guess what I’m getting at here is the illusion of free will. You can do what you want, but you don’t get to decide what you want. One day Hendricks wants to go home and live a quiet life as a wrestling coach, which he seemed perfectly qualified to do. The next day that sounds like a terrible idea. He wants no part of it. He wants a completely different life, which he also turned out to be perfectly qualified to pursue.

No doubt the concussion had something to do with this, and, generally speaking, it’s probably not a great idea to make life-altering decisions right after you wake up from a Baroni power shot. But I also have to think that it takes a certain kind of human to get knocked out one day and then ask for more in the morning. Something tells me that this kind of human might not be satisfied coaching wrestling for the rest of his life. If he forced himself to try it, I suspect it wouldn’t take long before he quit and went in search of another fight gym. I doubt he’d be able to stop himself.

We can argue over the question of whether fighters are born or made or a little bit of both, but it does seem like however they come to be, they’re stuck with it. Hendricks thought he was making a decision between going on and giving up, but it’s hard not to wonder if the decision was still his to make at that point.

As he said later of that first knockout: “I figured, if that’s the worst-case scenario, that’s not so bad. There’s not much you can do except train for it not to happen again.”

See what I mean? The guy who regarded losing a whole day and a series of pretty important conversations, plus enduring who knows what degree of damage to his brain, as “not so bad?” Yeah, you’re probably not going to keep him out of the gym for very long. Chances are he’s going to find a way to keep getting in one kind of fight or another, whether it’s in a cage or on a wrestling mat.

Maybe he chose it at one point, but it doesn’t seem like he’s choosing it now. Mostly he’s just living it, and, by the looks of things, doing a pretty good job of it.